Selfless Service

Yesterday morning this photo caught my attention. Taken by Samuel Aranda of Agence France-Presse, it shows members of Doctors Without Borders and local volunteers passing supplies across the Litani River in Lebanon. On this site the last bridge south was bombed.

Then during the day I heard a member the group, who was there at the Letani River speak yesterday. He said they handed four and a half tons of medical supplies across the river. Doctors Without Borders contacted the Israeli Army to let them know what they would be doing to seek assurances that they would not be attacked by ait or rockets. The army said they could give no assurances. The group and volunteers from the nearest village went to work anyway.

All of this was on the day after news went out of 15 aid workers killed in Sri Lanka. The 15, locals working for the French Agency Action Contre La Faim (Action Against Hunger), executed in the group's office. Those killed were clealry identified as aid workers through wearing their ACF shirts, according to that group's president.

At one time, aid workers were largely left alone in the world's conflicts, free to care for the needy as the battle raged on. As non-combatants are more seldomly immune to the real threat of death, so too aid workers die with more frequency in service to others.

I am left deeply impressed by the Doctors Without Borders group pushing ahead to get medical supplies into southern Lebanon. This admiration is not because many of the people there are Christian, though they are, but because their selfless service to others is very Christ-like. No matter what there religious background, the members of the group and the volunteers who assisted them showed courage that should inspire those of us who face no similar challenge in reaching out to the least among us.

In the archives are the sermons Small Things Done with Great Love, which includes the story of my visit not with aid workers in this sense, but with a group working in a very tough skum in Brazil, and the sermon A Great Cloud of Witnesses which tells of the martyrdom in 2003 of members of the Melanesian Brotherhood, a group of Anglican monks.

peace,
Frank+
The Rev. Frank Logue, Pastor + King of Peace Episcopal Church